Afghanistan moves ahead with plans for national electronic ID cards

It doesn’t appear to involve the biometric IDs that were first proposed by NATO, but the Afghanistan government has just announced plans to issue electronic ID cards to everyone in the country — an undertaking that it hopes will be complete in five years. That admittedly difficult effort got off to an official start today with the signing of a $101 .5 million contract with Afghan company Grand Technology Resources, which will apparently be responsible for producing the wallet-sized cards themselves. In addition to the usual identification, those will each contain a chip that stores the individual’s drivers license, vehicle registration, signature and voting registration records — the latter of which is particularly key, as one of the main reasons for the cards existence is to ensure ” fairer, more transparent and efficient” elections in the future. Afghanistan moves ahead with plans for national electronic ID cards originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on December 13, 2010. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry